A creator of visual content typically strives to ensure that developed visual content is aesthetically pleasing (or at least, aesthetically neutral) and/or effective in communicating a message or purpose of the content creator. For example, a designer of a web site must consider the appearance of the designed web site, while simultaneously ensuring that a purpose and functionality of each portion of the web site are clear to potential users. Similarly, advertisers seek to ensure that their advertisements will attract the attention of a target audience, while also conveying a message regarding the product.
In preparing visual content, it may be difficult for the designer to collect and aggregate feedback regarding either the aesthetic or functional nature of the visual content. For example, it may be difficult for the designer to identify a target audience of appropriate size for receiving and rating the visual content, or it may be difficult to provide the visual content to such a target audience. Even if the visual content is distributed to a selected target audience of appropriate size, it may be difficult for both the audience members and the designer of the visual content to provide/use the feedback in an effective way.
For example, if a user emails visual content to a number of other users (or posts content to a publicly-available website), the receiving/viewing users must find a way to verbally describe their opinions regarding the visual content, which may be cumbersome and ambiguous (for example, a receiving user might discuss a proposed web site design by saying that “the button in the upper left-hand corner next to the ‘submit’ button has an unclear function”). Generally speaking, then, the result of seeking feedback in this way is likely to be a string of responses (e.g., reply emails) that the originating user must individually read through in order to compile meaningful information and discard (or request follow-up on) ambiguous information.
Additionally, to the extent that such feedback requires effort and time on the part of receiving users, it becomes less likely that the receiving users will provide meaningful feedback at all. Somewhat similarly, if the originating user feels that the benefit from sifting through such feedback is outweighed by the non-trivial effort of making the visual content available in the first place, then the originating user may be less likely to solicit meaningful, large-scale feedback. This may be particularly true when a project or design must go through multiple revisions, since it may be difficult to correlate each revision with corresponding feedback for the purposes of comparison and tracking of progress.
Some conventional feedback systems do exist for providing feedback on visual content, and some of these may be operated in a centralized or standardized manner. However, such systems are typically limited to high-level opinions of the visual content as a whole (or of pre-defined portions), such as, for example, ranking an opinion of a picture on a scale of one to ten. Even if such systems provide an opportunity for viewing users to provide more detailed opinions than a simple ranking, the same problems discussed above may still arise (e.g., cumbersome for the viewing users to provide comment, and difficult to compile results). Moreover, such systems, even to the extent that they exist, are not typically available for use and control by any user, but are more likely implemented by a centralized administrator.